Post on 11-May-2023
This is a peer-reviewed, post-print (final draft post-refereeing) version of the following publisheddocument, This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Popular Music and Society on 31 January 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/03007766.2012.726036. and is licensed under All Rights Reserved license:
Moorey, Gerard (2014) Aging, Death, and Revival: Representations of the Music Industry in Two Contemporary Novels. Popular Music and Society, 37 (1). pp. 65-84. doi:10.1080/03007766.2012.726036
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2012.726036DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2012.726036EPrint URI: https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/1290
Disclaimer
The University of Gloucestershire has obtained warranties from all depositors as to their title in the material deposited and as to their right to deposit such material.
The University of Gloucestershire makes no representation or warranties of commercial utility, title, or fitness for a particular purpose or any other warranty, express or implied in respect of any material deposited.
The University of Gloucestershire makes no representation that the use of the materials will notinfringe any patent, copyright, trademark or other property or proprietary rights.
The University of Gloucestershire accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual property rights in any material deposited but will remove such material from public view pending investigation in the event of an allegation of any such infringement.
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR TEXT.
This is a peer-reviewed, post-print (final draft post-refereeing) version of the following
published document:
Moorey, Gerard (2014). Aging, Death, and Revival:
Representations of the Music Industry in Two
Contemporary Novels. Popular Music and Society,
37 (1) 65-84. ISSN 0300-7766
Published in Popular Music and Society, and available online at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03007766.2012.726036
We recommend you cite the published (post-print) version.
The URL for the published version is http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2012.726036
Disclaimer
The University of Gloucestershire has obtained warranties from all depositors as to their title
in the material deposited and as to their right to deposit such material.
The University of Gloucestershire makes no representation or warranties of commercial
utility, title, or fitness for a particular purpose or any other warranty, express or implied in
respect of any material deposited.
The University of Gloucestershire makes no representation that the use of the materials will
not infringe any patent, copyright, trademark or other property or proprietary rights.
The University of Gloucestershire accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual
property rights in any material deposited but will remove such material from public view
pending investigation in the event of an allegation of any such infringement.
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR TEXT.
1
Aging, Death, and Revival:
Representations of the Music Industry in Two Contemporary Novels
Gerard Moorey
This article examines the passing of the rock ideology: the system of distinctions and
stratifications whereby popular music was classified and argued over in terms of its
cultural value and authenticity. It does this by analyzing parallel representations of the
music industry in two contemporary novels: Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) and
Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Both novels suggest that rock
culture and the ideology underpinning it are finally nearing their end or, what amounts
to much the same thing, have undergone such a radical transformation in recent years as
to be unrecognizable.
In the popular press of the last couple of decades, any number of emergent cultural and
artistic forms have been casually granted the epithet “the new rock and roll”.1 But what
happens to rock and roll itself once it has become “old”? This is the question asked in
two acclaimed novels, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) and A Visit from the Goon
Squad (2010) by Jennifer Egan, both of which mark the passage into the second decade
of the new millennium. By alighting on characters who are intimately connected with the
music industry, either as musicians or as talent scouts and promoters, both novelists
examine the passing of what, in broad terms, might be called “the rock era”. This is to
2
say, they chart the decline and fall of “rock” not so much as a discrete style of music, or
even as a meta-genre (Fabbri), but rather as an ideology: a system of distinctions and
stratifications whereby popular music is classified and argued over in terms of its cultural
value and authenticity. As Keir Keightley comments, “Taking popular music seriously, as
something ‘more’ than mere entertainment or distraction, has been a crucial feature of
rock culture since its emergence” (110). It is precisely this endowment of seriousness to
popular music that Egan’s and Franzen’s novels question, not in order to disparage or
discredit popular music – at least, not chiefly in order to do this – but instead to re-think
its taken-for-granted centrality in the cultural life of Western societies since at least the
end of World War II. In their different ways, what both novelists do is to present us with
a world – our own – in which music is no longer as important as it once was.
The Rock Novel
Freedom and A Visit from the Goon Squad stand towards the end of an ever-growing line
of novels about rock music.2 Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street (1972) was a
distinguished early attempt to bring a serious novelistic treatment to bear on rock music
and the music industry. Looking back, it is noticeable how few rock novels were
published in the wake of DeLillo’s groundbreaking but flawed novel compared to those
that have been published in the last two decades, i.e. the decades immediately before and
after the turn of the millennium. One notices too that rock music has begun to attract the
attention of a greater number of serious novelists such as Salman Rushdie, Franzen, and
Egan, rather than being confined to pulp-ish accounts of cocaine-fuelled excess.3 In a
sense, the rock novel has come of age while rock music itself has grown old. This recent
3
burgeoning of the rock novel suggests that popular music enjoys increasing legitimacy as
a choice of subject matter, this no doubt being symptomatic of a “postmodern” leveling
of distinctions between “high” and “low” culture. This trend also results from the fact
that popular music has, to some extent, matured and stabilized, becoming a more tangible
object of study, no longer subject to quite the same mercurial shifts of taste and fashion
that it once was.
Very much like rock music itself, the rock novel now has its own canon, heritage, and
traditions, as well as its own stereotypes and clichés. (Reclusive rock stars, for example,
figure very prominently in the genre.) The rock novel is, of course, a subset of a larger
category of novels about music more generally, including those about classical music
such as Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) and Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music
(1999), which have portrayed to great effect the inner turmoil of composers and
musicians. The rock novel has its own sub-genres, such as those that deal specifically
with the music industry. It is to this sub-group that Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon
Squad and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom could be said to belong though both are about a
good deal besides. Novels about the music industry, like all literary descriptions, are
literally silent when it comes to the music itself, in that music defies translation into
words – or into any other medium for that matter. Such novels can, however, detail the
complex mediation that occurs between art and commerce, artist and audience, self-
expression and conformity, etc. They are also able to illuminate the inner workings of the
industry: not just the inner lives of musicians, though this is an important part of their
appeal, but also the complex, often chaotic relations that exist between those working
together in the industry.
4
Egan and Franzen are both celebrated authors and are contemporary challengers in the
quest for the Great American Novel. In 2010, Franzen became the first author in a decade
to appear on the cover of Time magazine just as Freedom, his long-awaited follow-up to
2001’s The Corrections, was being published. Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad was
awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is significant that in the same year, 2010,
two such distinguished authors published novels in which music features very
prominently. Both novelists can clearly be seen to be responding to recent changes in the
music industry, not least digitization and the growth of the internet as the main medium
via which music is distributed and consumed. In a broader sense, both novelists use the
music industry as a prismatic means of examining the broader social world. Egan and
Franzen invoke the history of popular music and the music industry in order to explore
themes of aging, mid-life crisis, obsolescence, nostalgia, and regret, and, more
concretely, they focus on rock music in order to unpick the legacy bequeathed by the
baby-boomer generation, who have played a crucial though not uncontested role in post-
1945 popular culture.
Generations X, Y, Z (and A) and the “Death” of Rock
As mentioned above, Egan and Franzen both suggest that music no longer has the same
centrality in the cultural life of Western societies as it once had and that this is linked to
the rise of media platforms in which music is relegated to a supporting role. The claim
made by each of their novels is that, in spite of an ever-widening range and variety of
music becoming available, popular music is no longer accorded the same ideological
weight that it once was. For a provisional explanation of popular music’s diminished
5
importance, one can look at how both Freedom and A Visit from the Goon Squad detail
the emergence of what has somewhat problematically come to be known as “generation
Y”: the optimistic, health-conscious, consumerist successors to the antagonistic,
nihilistic, and self-destructive generation X-ers. Egan goes so far as to posit what might
be called “generation Z” (or “generation A” depending on how you wish to divide these
things up); the final chapters of A Visit from the Goon Squad are set in the near future of
the 2020s, a world bestrode by “handset employees” such as Lulu, a woman in her early
twenties who is able to juggle life as “a graduate student at Barnard” while
simultaneously working full-time as a publicist for an aging record company executive.
In the eyes of the generation before hers, “She was ‘clean’: no piercings, tattoos or
scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them,…after watching three
generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps
and saggy asses?” (Egan 325). There is a sense here of the curtailing in our approximate
era of those spectacular youth movements that had been oriented, in large part, around
popular music, and had manifested an oppositional stance towards mainstream parental
culture through specifically subcultural modes of consumption (Cohen; Hebdige). In
Franzen’s Freedom, the former frontman of a 1980s post-punk band, Richard Katz,
seethes with anger as he surveys the crowd of youngsters at a “Bright Eyes” gig that he
has been talked into attending:
The nation was fighting ugly ground wars in two countries, the planet was
heating up like a toaster oven, and here at the 9:30 [club], all around him,
were hundreds of kids…with their sweet yearnings, their innocent
6
entitlement – to what? To emotion. To unadulterated worship of a
superspecial band. To being left to themselves to ritually repudiate, for an
hour or two on a Saturday night, the cynicism and anger of their elders.
They seemed…to bear malice toward nobody. Katz could see it in their
clothing, which bespoke none of the rage and disaffection of the crowds
he’d been a part of as a youngster. They gathered not in anger but in
celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more
respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with
consuming. (Franzen 369)
Significantly, in Franzen’s novel, the initiation of two members of this younger
generation – whom Katz feels so distant from – into sex and rock and roll (though not
drugs) is simultaneously a wholehearted embrace of capitalism. The “mutual
deflowering” of teenage neighbors Joey Berglund and Connie Monaghan is soundtracked
by U2’s Achtung Baby: “The opening track, in which Bono avowed that he was ready for
everything, ready for the push, had been their love song to each other and to capitalism.
The song had made Joey feel ready to have sex, ready to step out of childhood, ready to
make some real money selling watches at Connie’s Catholic school” (412-3). In this
example, the counter-cultural notion of rock music as a genre with anti-capitalist and
collectivist pretensions – emerging, however, in the late 1960s and early 1970s firmly
within the cash nexus – is dispensed with once and for all by a generation who no longer
share this ideology.
7
At a superficial level, one might surmise that both authors present a declinist view of
popular music, one in which an allegedly pristine creative practice becomes mired in
commercialism and mediocrity, and in which contemporary popular music is found
wanting in comparison with the music of earlier decades. As will be seen, however, Egan
and Franzen’s depiction of the culture of popular music is more sophisticated than this. It
would be more accurate to say that they display a studied ambivalence with regard to the
question of popular music’s decline, simultaneously contributing to and critiquing the
long-standing narrative of the imminent or already-accomplished demise of rock and roll
(Dettmar). Instead of a definitive “death” of rock and an accompanying collapse of the
music industry, both authors suggest a tentative rebirth, although on more modest and
sober terms. Significantly, this is a “rebirth” in which the rock ideology – rock as
oppositional, anti-commercial, liberating, etc. – is largely absent.
“We Pretended Rock Was the Scourge of Conformity and Consumerism”:
Representations of the Music Industry in Freedom
Freedom is, in one respect, a family saga spanning three generations, but is more sharply
focused on the love triangle that emerges between Walter and Patty Berglund and the
musician Richard Katz, who had been Walter’s roommate at college, where Walter also
met Patty (and Patty met Richard). The vicissitudes of Richard’s career as a lead vocalist
and guitarist, first with his post-punk band the Traumatics, and later with an alt-country
outfit called Walnut Surprise, serves as a temporal chart of the passage from early
adulthood to middle age and its accompanying musical soundtrack. References to musical
artists are often used in order to gauge some of the tectonic shifts that have occurred in
8
musical culture, especially with regard to the position occupied by music in the lives of
Americans and other Westerners. As Egan does in A Visit from the Goon Squad, Franzen
uses popular music in Freedom as a complex sociological marker. This is partly a matter
of who listens to what. Thus, Richard’s and Walter’s tastes run the gamut of alternative
rock and anything else considered sufficiently “original” and “authentic”; Patty, for her
part, listens to country music – not just the “vintage” artists such as Patsy Cline, Hank
Williams, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash that her husband Walter approves of, but
singers like Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chicks too, “never tir[ing] of cheating men and
strong women and the indomitable human spirit” (151); by contrast, Walter and Patty’s
daughter Jessica listens to “world music, especially African and South American” (354),
whereas their son Joey likes Tupac and Eminem. More significant than Freedom’s use of
musical taste as an indicator of social position and temperament is the way in which
Franzen reflects on the changing role of music in Western societies in order to reflect
more widely on complex social and cultural changes, which music and the music industry
have, almost of necessity, been entwined with.
The first of the novel’s main music-related episodes occurs when Patty goes to one of
Richard’s gigs, where she meets her future husband, Walter. The midweek show by
Richard’s band, the Traumatics, is also attended by Patty’s roommate Eliza whom
Richard is dating – or more precisely, having sex and taking cocaine with. The meeting
of the two sets of college roommates gives rise to an undertow of mutual antagonism and
“morbid” competition between them, especially between Patty and Eliza (in relation to
the love-object of Richard), and between Walter and Richard (with regard to Patty), and
between Eliza and Walter (in terms of their access to and intimacy with Richard) (71).
9
The theme of competitiveness runs through the entire novel, emerging as a contradiction
within liberal ideology and, as such, a curtailment on the ‘freedom’ that is the novel’s
title. In other words, competition is a founding tenet of liberal economics and the self-
determination that is alleged to arise from it but, in its extreme form, this very same
competitive principle threatens to undermine the political consensus and social cohesion
that would make a liberal vision of the good life sustainable. This theme of
competitiveness as both enabling and disabling is played out in relation to Richard’s
career as a musician, and in Walter’s amalgam of encouragement and jealousy that arise
in response to Richard’s changing fortunes. Throughout the novel, Richard comes across
as an anti-competitor in his disdain for the music industry, though Walter later suspects
that, with “his secret musical agenda”, Richard has been playing the long game, “keeping
his eyes on the prize” by shoring up reserves of credibility that have belatedly secured
him critical acclaim and commercial success of a kind denied to Walter in his fields of
endeavor (186).
When we first encounter Richard’s music in the novel, he is a young and exuberant
though not especially skilled stage performer, his band the Traumatics doing a support
slot for the Buzzcocks at a local venue:
Richard was more of a showman then than he came to be later, when it
seemed clear that he was never going to be a star and so it was better to be
an anti-star. He bounced on his toes, did lurching little half pirouettes with
his hand on the neck of his guitar, and so forth. He informed the audience
that he and his band was going to play every song it knew, and that this
10
would take twenty-five minutes. Then he and the band went totally haywire,
churning out a vicious assault of noise. (72)
Just prior to the Traumatics’ performance, Patty, the sports jock for whom it is her first
ever gig, is dismayed by “how ugly everything on the stage looked”: “The naked cords,
and the cold chrome of the drums, and the utilitarian mikes, and the kidnapper’s duct
tape, and the cannonlike spotlights: it all looked so hard core” (71). Midway through a
song called “I hate sunshine”, she makes a hasty flight for the exit.
The incidental detail that Richard’s band are supporting the Buzzcocks is just one of
many (post-)punk references in the early part of the novel. More broadly, such popular
music references are part of the novel’s meticulous evocation of social history. In a
manner that parallels Egan’s approach in Goon Squad, Franzen makes punk and new
wave the focus of the early part of the novel in order to establish Richard and Walter as
characters who are fundamentally in revolt against mainstream/parental culture so that
the quietist tenor of the generation that follows theirs is all the more striking. To a large
extent, it is Richard’s friendship with Walter that gives his songs a politically-oriented
framework, a way of bringing his lyrics and attitude to bear on the social issues of the
time.
Some fifteen years or so later, when Patty attends another Traumatics gig, it is a very
different Richard Katz that we meet onstage. (Her attendance with Walter at the gig
comes as part of one of Richard’s fleeting visits to the now-married couple – “the
Berglunds” – and their two children, while Richard is touring) (145). Though nominally
the headline act, the Traumatics are left with only “thirty die-hard…fans” once the
11
support act’s “late-adolescent friends [have] seeped out of the club” (143). For Patty, “It
was finally sinking in, with both her and Walter, that in spite of being a good musician
and a good writer Richard was not having the best life: had not actually been kidding
with all his self-deprecation and avowals of admiration and envy of her and Walter”
(ibid.). On their way home from the gig, Walter and Patty speculate about which one of
the girls in the support act Richard was going to hit on. The cliché of the sexually-
voracious rock singer takes on an unexpected poignancy throughout the novel as it
emerges that sexual conquests are, for Richard, a retreat from intimacy rather than a
fulfillment of it, the expression of a residual misogyny that only Patty, in his fondness for
her, is exempt from. Through his drug-use too, Richard is the embodiment of the rock
and roll lifestyle, though it should be stated that the characterization in the novel is so
nuanced and sophisticated that Richard is never allowed to become merely a cipher for
“rock”. In spite of this multifaceted characterization, it could be said that Richard, as the
embodiment of rock music, enacts the ambivalence of rock in regard to one of the novel’s
overarching themes: the tension between self-indulgence and altruism. This tension was
inherent in the construction of rock music in that it was founded upon the dual myths of
individual hedonism and collective identity. This explains the thwarting of Richard’s
desire, derived from Walter, to be “a good person”: his selfishness and competitiveness,
especially with regard to sexual adventures, sporadically makes him put himself before
those he genuinely loves – most obviously, Walter, but also Patty too. This tension is
played out against the wider backdrop of Western liberalism, in particular the Smithian
notion of enlightened self-interest being a social good. Arguably, this is a contradiction
that liberalism – as well as rock music – is incapable of resolving. Earlier in the novel,
12
when Walter and Richard are still roommates at college, they rehearse for Patty a
discussion they’ve been having about the limits of liberal democracy (a discussion that
will resound throughout the latter part of the novel when Walter begins to pursue
seriously his goals as an ecologist and political activist):
“Richard’s excited about Margaret Thatcher,” Walter said. “He thinks she
represents the excesses of capitalism that will inevitably lead to its self-
destruction. I’m guessing he’s writing a love song.”
…“Walter thinks the liberal state can self-correct,” Richard said. “He
thinks the American bourgeoisie will voluntarily accept increasing
restrictions on its personal freedoms.” (101-2)
It is only in the alt-country phase of Richard’s career – a mournful melancholic stage, a
lament for the passing of, and disillusionment with, the rock myth of collective identity
through individual acts of hedonism – that Richard begins to resolve this contradiction
between altruism and self-indulgence in his life, though this is achieved more by the
expression of regret than anything more proactive and positive. In other words, the novel
mourns the passing of the “rock” era in an extended sense, mourning too the notion that
bourgeois liberalism can, in Richard’s skeptical words, “self-correct”, i.e. the hope that
ecological or geo-political tragedy of near-apocalyptic scale can be averted, that a less
devastating “correction”, as posited within rock ideology, might occur instead –
“correction” being a significant word in Franzen’s oeuvre.
13
Throughout the novel, the music industry is presented as an elaborate system of credit
and debt, which, of course, takes on added poignancy in the context of the global
recession that began in 2008 as a “credit crunch”. Such is the extent to which the life of a
recording artist is characterized by the tipping scales of credit and debt, that Richard
tends to view his personal relations in these terms too. When he splits up with his casual
girlfriend and bandmate Molly Tremain, Richard comes to realise that the
disproportionate critical acclaim that the Traumatics had been receiving relative to their
meager commercial success had been a result largely of the fact that Molly’s mother was
a longtime Arts editor at the New York Times: “What had happened, as Richard theorized
over an early supper with Walter and Patty when the band dragged itself through the
Twin Cities yet again, was that he’d been buying press attention on credit all along,
without realizing it, and that the press had finally concluded that familiarity with the
Traumatics was never going to be necessary to anyone’s cultural literacy or street
credibility, and so there was no reason to extend him further credit” (143). Later in the
novel, Richard makes a series of exorbitant promises to Walter regarding his new band’s
involvement with Walter’s “Free Space” campaign to make abstaining from having
children fashionable with young people in order to ameliorate humanity’s predilection for
ecological devastation. But Richard knows full well that none of these promises, such as
emceeing a Free Space festival and “pestering big names to come and join him”, will
come to pass as he is planning indirectly to divulge to Walter details of the affair that he
has been having with Walter’s wife, Patty. In doing this, Richard hopes that he will be
able to force Walter into the arms of his amorous personal assistant and, in the process,
14
clear his own way to Patty. Again the language of credit and debit permeates Richard’s
overly-caffeinated-and-nicotinized thoughts:
In his mind, he was doing nothing more than writing checks on an account
with nothing in it, because, despite the actual chemical substances he’d
ingested, the true substance of his state was a throbbing, single-minded
focus on taking Patty away from Walter: this was the rhythm track,
everything else was irrelevant high-end. Smash the Family: another song
title. And once the family was smashed, he would not have to make good on
any of his promises. (366)
By means of these metaphors of credit and debt, Richard’s intermittently-precarious and
frequently-reckless financial situation comes to serve as an oblique allegory of the neo-
liberal era, especially the emergence and proliferation of financial products of a largely
illusory nature, leading to a so-called “casino capitalism”. The moral ramifications of
such a system of credit and debt are played out most fully, not in relation to the
essentially hedonistic character of Richard Katz, but instead in relation to Patty Berglund:
Patty’s painstaking personal audit forms two lengthy autobiographical sections in the
novel, in which she reflects on her marriage with Walter in terms of a complex series of
pluses and minuses. The motto that she glimpses on the wall of her daughter’s college
building, “USE WELL THY FREEDOM”, encapsulates the novel’s main theme and
serves as a satiric indictment of neo-liberalism’s de-regulated free-market economics – a
“freedom”, it is suggested, that has been used badly (184).
15
During the Traumatics’ wilderness years, Richard develops a sideline in building decks
for luxury rooftop apartments in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. This detail
is a reminder of the economic reality of the majority of those in the music industry: that
there is not enough work of enough pay in the industry itself for them not to have to rely
on other sources of income. After Richard’s long-time collaborator succumbs to an
horrendous accident of the kind that seems to frequent the pages of many a rock
biography, the Traumatics disband and Richard forms a new band, co-opting a young fan
on pedal-steel to complete Walnut Surprise’s alt-country line-up. Richard’s economic
fortunes take a sharp turn for the better with the release of their album Nameless Lake, a
collection of songs secretly addressed to Patty, some of which Richard wrote while doing
construction work on Walter and Patty’s remote second home, next to the lake of the title.
Its “gorgeous…songs” aside, Nameless Lake is a commercial and critical success
because it is perceived as the authentic expression of a mature artist, but the media
interest and industry plaudits it garners make Richard feel radically inauthentic, causing
him to lurch towards some decidedly immature behavior such as agreeing “to score a
Danish art film” but then “taking 5,000 euros of Danish government arts funding up his
nose” (191). Within a few years of his group being nominated for a Grammy, Richard is
back building decks for NYC’s high-rise gentry, but this time with little-or-no interest in
being involved in the music industry. Very reluctantly, he submits to being interviewed
by the skinny-jean-wearing son of one of his clients. Richard privately laments the way
the boy’s father, himself a former Traumatics fan, nurtures his son’s ambitions to be a
guitarist in a rock band:
16
The kid had been given his own practice room, a cubical space lined with
eggshell foam and scattered with more guitars than Katz had owned in thirty
years. Already, for pure technique, to judge from what Katz had overheard
in his comings and goings, the kid was a more hotdog soloist than Katz had
ever been or ever would be. But so were a hundred thousand other American
high-school boys. So what? Rather than thwarting his father’s vicarious rock
ambitions by pursuing entomology or interesting himself in financial
derivatives, Zachary dutifully aped Jimi Hendrix. Somewhere there had
been a failure of imagination. (199)
In this example, rock music has been fully domesticated and rock culture’s essentially
oedipal dynamic disrupted: there are no longer the same oppositions or distinctions
within popular culture, especially between parent culture and teen/adolescent culture. (It
should be mentioned, however, that the oedipal dynamic persists in the way that Walter’s
son Joey evinces a literally mercenary approach to personal enrichment, thereby rejecting
his father’s mostly anti-capitalist values. This, though, is a further rejection of the rock
ideology with its espousal of anti- or hippie-capitalist ideals founded upon somewhat
vague notions of collective identity.) As will be seen in A Visit from the Goon Squad,
Freedom suggests that rock has limped on through the decades since its inception into an
unwitting assimilation by the mainstream, as the social and cultural peccadilloes of the
baby-boomers have gained almost universal tolerance and acceptance; the result is that
the counter-cultural ideology underpinning rock music is now defunct (and “de-funked”).
17
Rather than being a grudging acceptance of his public role as the frontman of a
Grammy-nominated band, Richard’s agreement to be interviewed is a way for him to flex
his competitive muscles again by – so he intends – seducing the high-school girl whom
his interviewer, the teenage Zachary, hopes to impress by posting the interview online.
Richard uses the interview to mount a sarcastic diatribe against rock culture and the
music industry in general. When asked by Zachary what he thinks of “the MP3
revolution”, Richard retorts sarcastically, “It’s great that a song now costs exactly the
same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavor
and you have to spend another buck” (200). He spits the following glib and sneering
obituary to the rock age and its counter-cultural ideology:
That era which finally ended whenever, yesterday – you know, that era
when we pretended rock was the scourge of conformity and consumerism,
instead of its anointed handmaid – that era was really irritating to me. I think
it’s good for the honesty of rock and roll and good for the country in general
that we can finally see Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop for what they really were:
as manufacturers of wintergreen Chiclets.
Q: So you’re saying rock has lost its subversive edge?
A: I’m saying it never had any subversive edge. It was always wintergreen
Chiclets. (200)
18
What Richard does, then, in this interview is to deride the widely-held assumption in
rock culture that “there is some essential human activity, music-making, which has been
colonized by commerce” (Frith 231). (I sometimes think of this as the “School-of-Rock”
ethos, owing to the way Jack Black’s character in the film of that name defines rock
music as being about “sticking it to the Man”.) Instead of being “something which
happens to music”, the commercialization or industrialization of music “describes a
process in which music itself is made” (Frith 231). This is to say the forms of musical
communication that have obtained throughout the twentieth century and on into the
twenty-first have not been a distortion of some more organic, integral, or pristine form of
musicking; instead they are the direct result of prevailing social, technical, and economic
circumstances: a specifically industrialized and capitalist mode of consumption and
production, which, to be sure, allows for a good measure of “relative autonomy” but is
not to be understood as a musical after-effect or post hoc imposition.
After finishing his day’s work at Zachary’s parents’ home, Richard makes his way to
the train station “under a familiar cloud of post-interview remorse”: “He wasn’t worried
about having given offense; his business was giving offense. He was worried about
having sounded pathetic – too transparently the washed-up talent whose only recourse
was to trash his betters. He strongly disliked the person he’d just demonstrated afresh that
he unfortunately was” (Franzen 203-4). Once Zachary has posted their interview online
and the “hit-counter” on his blog is “going crazy”, Richard finds he has to relinquish
virtually all control over his public image in a way that is symptomatic of an identity
crisis in the age of the internet (346). Zachary summarizes for Richard the traffic through
his website: “there’s a minority now that’s saying you sound like an asshole and a
19
whiner. But that’s just the player-hating fringe” (ibid.). Later, as Richard is travelling on
the train, he has an altercation with a young couple regarding one of them littering. He
acknowledges to himself that if either one of them had recognized him, “they would
surely soon be blogging about what an asshole Richard Katz was” (350). The episode
suggests an internet-facilitated degeneration of the culture of popular music into a culture
of banal gossip – a welter of trivial comments and asides that render meaningful
communication between an artist and his or her audience increasingly difficult. The
blogosphere thus becomes a further arena among the popular media in which performing
artists have dwindling control over their image or the meaning of themselves as a “star
text”, leading, in many cases, to nihilism and self-destruction (Dyer). There is too a
Warholian sense that, via the internet, all of us have been subject to a similar process in
which the definition of who we are finally eludes our grasp: a sense that our identities
reside as so much data in the matrices of cyberspace.
In the latter half of the novel, a discussion takes place between several of the main
characters regarding what Walter’s newly-founded NGO can do musically to promote its
cause of “reversing global population growth [by] making it uncool to have kids” (366).
During the discussion, antagonism emerges between members of the older and younger
generations in relation to their differing conceptions of how the music industry operates.
Walter’s personal assistant and romantic pursuer Lalitha envisions “a late-summer music
and consciousness-raising festival on a twenty-acre goat farm” headlined by the era’s
most illustrious artists a la Woodstock (ibid.). This centralized notion of musical culture
is immediately smacked down by Walter’s daughter Jessica, partly in retaliation for what
Jessica correctly perceives as Lalitha’s romantic advances on her father: “Did Lalitha not
20
understand anything about young people’s new relationship with music? It wasn’t enough
just to bring in some big-name talent! They had to send twenty interns out to twenty cities
across the country and have them organize local festivals” (ibid.). Jessica, then, has a
conception of contemporary musical culture as inherently networked, no longer
functioning via the relationship between centre and periphery as in the rock era, but via a
dispersed web of local nodes connected by the “new” rather than the “old” media. This
exchange between Lalitha and Jessica reflects a resurgence of interest in live music in
recent years, in particular the proliferation of music festivals, which correlates, in part, to
the devaluation of recorded music in the era of downloads, file-sharing, and the limited
licensing of pop songs for use in conjunction with the various forms of screen media. In
an intensively mediatized culture, the prospect of attending a musical event that is both
“live” and “local” feeds a residual appetite for rock “authenticity”, providing young
people with a significant rite of passage askance from, though not entirely outside of, the
media circuits and loops they customarily inhabit. As will be seen, these themes are taken
up, too, in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Richard Katz’s last musical output in the novel is a CD sent by post to his estranged
college-friend, entitled Songs for Walter. After Walter has opened the CD’s plastic
wrapping, he is overcome by a complex of tender and sorrowful memories and emotions
when he notices that the first song on the album bears the title “Two Kids Good, No Kids
Better”, which Walter had jokingly suggested Richard use as a song title, back when they
were roommates at college: “He heard a sharp cry of pain, his own, as if it were someone
else’s. The fucker, the fucker, it wasn’t fair… ‘God, what an asshole you are,’ he said,
smiling and weeping. ‘This is so unfair, you asshole’ ” (557). Richard’s sending the
21
album effects a rapprochement on many levels, fusing the two men’s often opposing
though sometimes complementary values. Throughout the novel, Walter and Richard
have represented, respectively, domesticity and bohemianism, though neither figure is
conventional as such – nor conventionally unconventional. By producing an album of
songs addressed to his oldest friend, Richard is submitting in part to Walter’s earnest
worldview, acknowledging the positive influence that Walter has had on him, the way
Walter has motivated Richard to be “a good person” in spite of the latter’s deeply-rooted
instincts to the contrary.
“It’s Too Late. I’m Too Old”: Representations of the Music Industry in A Visit from
the Goon Squad
The power of music – or at least, in this instance, the sight of a musical artifact – to
produce a rapprochement is a theme that also figures prominently in the final chapter of A
Visit to the Goon Squad. For most of Egan’s novel, however, the music industry is
presented in terms that parallel Franzen’s caustic image of it as the moral and aesthetic
equivalent of producing and consuming chewing gum. Like Franzen’s novel, too, A Visit
from the Goon Squad mourns the passing of what, in broad terms, can be called “the rock
era”, coinciding with the second half of the twentieth century, and in which popular
music occupied a central place in the cultural imaginary to an extent that is difficult to
conceive of now in our present era.
By putting popular music at the heart of Freedom and Goon Squad, Franzen and Egan
allow the complexities of the music industry to stand for the complexities of social
mediation more generally. The following quote from Gerry Smyth’s book on “the music-
22
novel” applies to both authors’ representation of the music industry: “pop accumulates so
many layers of significance during each stage of its realization – from composition to
performance to consumption – that it stands as an extremely complex phenomenon within
any society’s wider cultural landscape” (167, 109). In particular, Egan and Franzen both
explore the notion that the record industry is fraught with a much greater degree of
instability and unpredictability than industries in which identical or nearly identical
products can be sold over and over again, and that it is this very indeterminacy that
makes the music industry indicative, or emblematic even, of our era and its forms of
sociality. Furthermore, the music industry has an inherent pathos, as, seen from one
perspective, it is founded more upon managing failure than producing success: “Despite
constant attempts to establish a sense of brand loyalty to an artist, or to develop or imitate
hit formulas, despite all of the marketing and promotional techniques and coping
strategies…, the recording industry constantly produces more failures than successes”
(Negus 152). This tendency towards failure and the thwarting of intentions again makes
the music industry a particularly apposite vehicle for the exploration of contiguous areas
of contemporary experience within the novel.
In a book the subtitle of which is “culture and conflict in the popular music industry”,
Keith Negus typifies the music industry as a complex or chaotic system: “During my
research a number of staff in the recording industry referred to a phenomenological
experience of chaos and disorder when trying to explain the routine and irregular
activities and myriad personal relationships which surrounded them and informed their
daily work” (151). This aspect of life in the music industry is explored in detail in Egan’s
A Visit from the Goon Squad, which, to a much greater extent than Franzen’s Freedom,
23
describes a world of record company executives, A & R personnel, and publicists, all of
whom work behind the scenes in order to make their roster of artists commercially
successful.
The structure of Egan’s novel is well-suited to elucidating the complexity and
indeterminacy inherent in a career in the music industry. Each chapter is more or less
self-contained and the novel, though following a broadly chronological trajectory,
presents events radically out of sequence. An especially bold structuring device is the
way that peripheral characters in one chapter reappear as the main characters of
subsequent chapters or vice versa, often with an accompanying shift in narrative voice
from third-person to first-person and with a dramatic leap of time-frame. This
experimental structure produces a complex prismatic conception of identity, which
contrasts the more straightforwardly biographical movement of Franzen’s characters
towards greater awareness and knowledge of self. In Egan’s novel, characters’ identities
are continually being refracted through other characters’ perceptions of them as well as
via the narration of unanticipated incidents from otherwise-disjointed moments in their
lives. The effect is to allow the reader to perceive a complex web of relations, both
between characters and between the different eras of a single character’s life, a web
which the characters themselves are, at best, only dimly aware of.
Thus, in chapter one, we are introduced to Sasha, a Xanax-popping kleptomaniac
woman now in her mid-thirties who is out on a date with a male legal secretary called
Alex. After a one-night stand in her apartment on New York’s Lower East Side, the pair
never meet again. However, Alex reappears several times throughout the novel, and, in
the final chapter set sometime in the 2020s, he ends up working for Sasha’s former boss,
24
Bennie Salazar, the founder of Sow’s Ear Records and discoverer of a successful post-
punk outfit called the Conduits. From the third-person narration of the first chapter,
which is refracted through Sasha’s troubled and distracted state of mind, we also learn
that Bennie “sprinkled gold flakes into his coffee – as an aphrodisiac, she suspected – and
sprayed pesticide in his armpits” (Egan 5). Other than these details, that is all we hear
about Bennie. In chapter two, however, we meet Bennie at a time in his life when Sasha
is still working for him as his personal assistant and he has just embarked on his regimen
of coffee sprinkled with gold flakes, which, as Sasha has correctly surmised, Bennie
hopes will reinvigorate his flagging libido:
The world was unquestionably a more peaceful place without the half hard-
on that had been his constant companion since the age of thirteen, but did
Bennie want to live in such a world? He sipped his gold-inflected coffee and
glanced at Sasha’s breasts, which had become the litmus test he used to
gauge his improvement. (23)
Occurring to someone who has spent his whole adult life in the music industry, initially
as a musician and then as an executive, the loss of Bennie’s “mojo” is symptomatic, in
some respects, of what he views as the record industry’s terminal decline. In an argument
over whether or not to keep one of the label’s acts that Bennie had thought sounded
promising when he signed them five years earlier, Sasha reminds him of his own motto
for working in the music business: “ ‘Five years is five hundred years’ ” (35). Here, the
25
built-in obsolescence of musical products serves as an analogue of Bennie’s fears
regarding his own obsolescence – commercial, parental, but chiefly sexual.
On his way to pick up his son from school, Bennie listens to the Sleepers and the Dead
Kennedys on his car stereo, “San Francisco bands he’d grown up with”, and ponders his
own role in the industry:
He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual
instruments in an actual room. Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all)
was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape –
everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers
were churning out. He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay
on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring
tones (and steal, of course) – above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil
extractors he’d sold his label to five years ago. But Bennie knew that what
he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem
was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the
life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film,
photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than
to say this stuff aloud. (23-4)
Like so many others of his generation, Bennie fetishizes the alleged authenticity of pre-
digital recordings, his nostalgia for the album as a commodity fetish dovetailing with his
nostalgia for his youth, “the rapturous surges of sixteen-year-old-ness” that listening to
26
these old songs induces (ibid.). In a future-oriented industry in which staff are continually
trying to find “ ‘the next big thing”, to produc[e] tomorrow’s sounds, to bring…into
existence what is ‘not yet’ ”, Bennie has succumbed to nostalgia (Negus 152). Recalling
how his mentor, the producer Lou Kline, had told him in the nineties that rock and roll
had peaked at Monterey Pop, Bennie acknowledges now, as he did then, that “Nostalgia
was the end – everyone knew that” (Egan 39).
Now middle aged, Bennie must endure a mostly fruitless search for the holy grail of
rock authenticity: a musical transcendental signified, a presence not subject to the
vagaries of fashion’s floating signifiers. For a few fleeting moments, he thinks he has
found it when he and Sasha pay a visit to two sisters whose band, Stop/Go, has failed to
deliver a single album in the five years that they’ve been on Bennie’s label. Listening to
the sisters play in their basement, Bennie feels “the raw, almost-threadbare sound of their
voices mixed with the clash of instruments”: “these sensations mixed with a faculty
deeper in Bennie than judgment or even pleasure; they communed directly with his body,
whose shivering, bursting reply made him dizzy” (31). But interrupted by various
“memory spasm[s]”, i.e. involuntary memories of personal humiliation, Bennie is lifted
out of this moment of musical jouissance, until, on the way back in the car, he is forced to
concur with Sasha’s verdict that the Stop/Go sisters are “Unlistenable” (25, 35).
Rather than talk, they listen to a selection of early punk songs playing on the stereo,
Bennie toying with the idea that through the playlist “he was confessing to her his
disillusionment – his hatred for the industry he’d given his life to” (38). From “some
early Who”, “the Stooges”, “Patti Smith’s ragged poetry” and “the jock hardcore of
Black Flag”, through the “great compromise” of “alternative”, Bennie finally arrives at
27
“the singles he’d just today been petitioning radio stations to add, husks of music, lifeless
and cold as the squares of office neon cutting the blue twilight” (ibid.). Breaking the
silence between them, Sasha remarks that “ ‘It’s incredible…how there’s just nothing
there’ ” (ibid.). Bennie at first takes this as a sign that Sasha has somehow been able to
follow his “musical rant to its grim conclusion”, but a moment later he realizes she is
“looking downtown…to the empty space where the Twin Towers had been” (ibid.). This
exchange between Bennie and Sasha draws a parallel, which emerges elsewhere in the
novel, between the decline of US political hegemony and the decline of the rock ideology
in a post-9/11 world. The “rock era” has ended or is coming to an end in the same era in
which the US no longer seems capable of exerting the same level of political and cultural
dominance it once did, its fate now being intertwined with those of ascendant economies,
most notably China, whose population greatly outnumbers America’s own.
In the following chapter, we encounter Bennie as a Mohawked teenager through the
admiring first-person narration of Rhea, one of his bandmates in a punk group called the
Flaming Dildos. On weekends, the bandmates journey to the Mabuhay Gardens in San
Francisco in order to hear all the punk bands play. The elusiveness of rock authenticity
emerges again as a theme, this time through Rhea’s anxious and uncertain narration.
When she and the other female member of the Flaming Dildos go to “the Mab’s graffiti-
splattered bathroom”, they overhear various gossip about the other punks: “Knowing all
this makes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake
Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened?”
(48).
28
In a later chapter, Bennie’s former bandmate in the Flaming Dildos, the singer and
guitarist Scotty, pays a surprise visit to Bennie at the latter’s offices at Sow’s Ear
Records. In spite of the intervening years, Bennie is described by Scotty as being “trim”,
“fit”, and wearing an “expensive”-looking shirt (103). By contrast, Scotty’s bohemian
rock and roll lifestyle has degenerated into something more closely resembling the life of
a vagabond. In the swanky waiting room, Scotty senses a couple “of the corporate
persuasion…edge away” from him, then, inside Bennie’s grand office with its view of the
whole city, Scotty is separated from his former friend and bandmate by an enormous
black desk. Their strained conversation turns to the question of “what happened between
A and B”, i.e. between then and now, and how their two lives took such different turns,
this being the novel’s abiding theme. Engulfed by a mood of stifled resentment, Scotty
experiences a violent fantasy in which he decapitates Bennie with his bare hands before
dropping it onto the desk of Bennie’s personal assistant, Sasha (103, 107). As we already
know by this stage in the novel, no-one, not even someone as outwardly successful as
Bennie, is immune to the cruelly erosive effects of time. In the figures of Scotty and
Bennie, the pathos of aging extends to rock culture, which has itself “grown old”.
It should be pointed out at this stage that one of the central themes of Egan’s work as a
whole is the shame associated with aging in a youth- and beauty-obsessed culture. This is
especially pertinent in A Visit from the Goon Squad with its cruel dissection of what
becomes of musicians once the years of fast living and self-indulgence have receded,
exposing a pudgy, wrinkled senescence, itself a metaphor for the decline of US political
and cultural hegemony in a post-9/11 world, more specifically the decline of the rock
ideology and the liberal capitalist consensus it was founded on. This theme finds its
29
starkest treatment in the figure of Bosco, the former lead guitarist of a group called the
Conduits, which Bennie had helped make famous. It is typical of the novel’s
chronological game-playing that we first come across Bosco once he is physically
decrepit, a present-tense description of his manic skinny younger self being saved for a
later chapter. Instead of being “a hive of redheaded mania who had made Iggy Pop look
indolent onstage”, Bosco is now “obese, alcoholic and cancer-ridden” (119, 132). When
Bennie’s wife Stephanie goes to visit him, accompanied by her brother Jules, ostensibly
to help Bosco with the promotion of his new album but more out of a sense of loyalty to
him as she and her husband’s oldest friend, she notices how “His red hair had devolved
into a stringy gray ponytail” and how “An unsuccessful hip replacement had left him with
the lurching, belly-hoisting walk of a refrigerator on a hand truck” (132). In an echo of
Bennie’s encounter with this former friend and bandmate Scotty, Bosco remarks that his
new album’s “called A to B, right?...And that’s the question I want to hit straight on: how
did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?” (134). In order to
reinforce his point, he adds “Time’s a goon, right?” (ibid.). This phrase “Time is a goon”
explains the otherwise enigmatic title of the novel: time is a thug or bully, so that
receiving “a visit from the goon squad” means to be subjected to the violence and cruelty
of time and its passing. In Bosco’s case the thuggery of time is all the more harsh as he
has lived most of his adult life as an icon of youthful energy, his residual public image,
being cruelly at odds with what he has actually become. The plan he pitches to his
publicist Stephanie is for a grotesque parody of the now-familiar rock and roll
“comeback”: one last tour in which he will imitate his former frenetic self in the almost-
certain knowledge that the physical exertion will kill him at some point: “We know the
30
outcome, but we don’t know when, or where, or who will be there when it finally
happens. It’s a Suicide Tour” (136).
The phrase “Time’s a goon” reoccurs in the final chapter of the novel when the now-
aged Bennie uses it in order to goad the equally-aged Scotty onto the stage at an open-air
concert he has arranged for him at the former site of the Twin Towers: “You gonna let
that goon push you around?” (341). In reply, Scotty shakes his head and mutters
resignedly “The goon won” (ibid.).
Before discussing Scotty’s unexpectedly momentous concert in more detail, I would
like to analyze what has, with good reason, become probably the novel’s most talked-
about chapter: I refer to chapter 12, which consists entirely of PowerPoint slides. This
chapter takes us into the near-future and is “narrated” by Sasha’s teenage daughter,
Alison. Alison’s obsession with detailing the day-to-day events in the lives of her mother,
father and brother in the form of graphs, flow charts, and pie diagrams seems to border on
the autistic, but is as nothing compared to her brother’s obsession, which, we can infer, is
a symptom of actual and quite profound autism. Alison’s brother Lincoln records in
meticulous detail what he describes as “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” (242), i.e. moments
during rock songs in which there is a brief pause. One of the most poignant slides bears
the heading “Lincoln Wants to Say/Ends Up Saying:”, and traces how the words “ ‘I love
you, Dad’ ” are subjected to a series of logical but overly-factual contortions as part of
Lincoln’s train of thought until they are vocalized as the exclamation “ ‘Hey Dad, there’s
a partial silence at the end of [the Steve Miller Band’s] “Fly Like an Eagle,” with a sort
of rushing sound in the background that I think is supposed to be the wind, or maybe time
rushing past!’ ” (255). The most lasting impression of Lincoln’s exhaustive cataloguing
31
of such pauses and their various parameters is bemusement, yet this apparently autistic
behavior can also be related to the novel’s other themes. In an incident involving the
whole family, Lincoln’s father Drew tries to tease out from his son why the pauses matter
so much to him. When his son responds with a litany of illustrations of yet more
compositions with pauses mid-song, Drew loses his patience with him and Lincoln starts
to cry. Sasha intervenes, explaining very softly to her husband what these “Great Rock
and Roll Pauses” mean to their son: “The pause makes you think the song will end. And
then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end,
because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.”
(289). This explanation is linked to the novel’s theme of history, culture, and society
being close to the end but not quite, or seemingly coming to an end and then continuing,
for a while at least. In an earlier chapter of the novel, one of the many characters to have
suffered a humiliating fall from grace, Stephanie’s brother Jules, offers the following
response to their meeting with Bosco, combining mournfulness with cautious optimism in
a way that becomes characteristic of the latter sections of the novel: “ ‘If you’d asked me
this morning, I would have said we were finished…All of us, the whole country – the
fucking world. But now I feel the opposite…Sure, everything is ending…but not yet’ ”
(139).
This sense of, if not quite a new beginning then, a deferred ending becomes very
evident in the final chapter, which is set in the 2020s. In one of Egan’s deliciously satiric
and dystopian touches, the recording industry has been saved by the emergence of a
“preverbal” market consisting of millions of babies who each press a button on a
miniature handset in order to buy songs they like the sound of: “Fifteen years of war had
32
ended with a baby boom, and these babies had not only revived a dead industry but also
become the arbiters of musical success” (320). Egan’s satire here operates on at least a
few different levels. Firstly, she is satirizing the original baby-boomer generation, who
came of age in the mid-to-late 1960s and were able to exert enormous cultural influence
partly by dint of the sheer size of their demographic. Secondly, she is satirizing our
culture’s obsession with youth, in which the tastes and fashions of the young are
routinely kowtowed to. In connection with this latter point, she is satirizing the tendency
of the marketing industry post-1945 to target ever younger sectors of society, from the
teenager of the 1950s, to the sexualized “tweenie” or pre-teen of the 1990s, until,
logically, their focus turns to a sector who are not yet out of diapers.
Having suffered his own fall from grace – divorce from Stephanie and dismissal from
the record label he founded – Bennie has sought out his erstwhile friend and bandmate
Scotty Hausmann, and set about producing albums for him (319). When we encounter
Bennie in the final chapter, he is formulating a strategy for promoting a free concert for
Scotty that will build upon the success Scotty has been having with “the pointers”, i.e.
infants who download music using handsets. In order to do this, he enlists the help of
Alex, the one-time legal secretary that Bennie’s former PA Sasha had slept with in
chapter one, and who has gone on to have a succession of mostly unsatisfying jobs in the
record business (320). Alex wants to work for Bennie as a sound engineer but, instead,
Bennie persuades him to head his marketing operation, remarking caustically that the
music industry is “not about sound anymore. It’s not about music. It’s about reach” (319).
In spite of these comments, Bennie praises the “pure”, “untouched” nature of Scotty’s
music, and has recorded his slide guitar with “a raspy, analog sound” (ibid.).
33
The promotional campaign for Scotty’s concert takes the form of what we would
recognize as an example of “viral” marketing: Alex’s task is to enlist a team of “parrots”
who, unbeknownst to each other, will tell friends, family and acquaintances about a
“great” singer and slide-guitarist who happens to be playing a free concert at an open-air
performance space, “the Footprint”, on the former site of the Twin Towers. In spite of the
seeming-applicability of the “viral” metaphor, Bennie’s new personal assistant Lulu, who
is studying marketing at grad school, insists that such metaphors, drawn from the field of
epidemiology, are no longer deemed appropriate; “reach”, she explains, “isn’t describable
in terms of cause and effect anymore: it’s simultaneous. It’s faster than the speed of light,
that’s actually been measured” (324-5). Thus, she and her fellow marketing students are
required to study particle physics as part of their program. On the day of the concert,
there does indeed seem to be sense of non-linearity and synchronicity in the way the
promotional campaign has come together. Alex, his wife, and their young daughter merge
with the surge of people on the closed-off streets of Manhattan, who, like them, are on
their way to hear Scotty play, each person they recognize informing them that they’ve
“heard” that Scotty’s supposed to be really good live (338).
When Alex arrives at the venue for the concert, all is not well however. Bennie
summons him to Scotty Hausmann’s trailer where, in Scotty’s place, he finds someone
more closely resembling a “decrepit roadie”, and who is suffering acute stage-fright:
“Scotty Hausmann sounded like he’d recently wept or was on the verge of weeping –
possibly both. He had shoulder-length hair slicked away from his face and empty, blasted
eyes, all of it amounting to a derelict impression…: a shell whose essence had vanished”
(340-1). In spite of Bennie’s exhortations to go through with the concert, Scotty refuses:
34
“ ‘It’s too late. I’m too old. I just – I can’t’ ” (340). It would seem that time has finally
“beat” the rock generation. However, an intervention by Lulu saves the day. Arriving just
as Scotty is trying to escape, she offers to walk with him to the stage. As Scotty takes her
arm, his other hand now holding his guitar, Alex notices “a ghost version of Scotty
Hausmann flicker…from the dregs that were left, sexy and rakish” (343). Once onstage,
Scotty’s music combines a strength, honesty, and purity of purpose that unites the crowd,
giving them a meaningful collective experience of the kind, it is suggested, they had been
hungering for: “it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object
to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and
Woodstock” (343-4). Here, the musical agency is as much the audience’s as it is Scotty’s.
“Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance [post 9/11] had left people
craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a
slide guitar” (344). As Alex scans the crowd looking for his wife and daughter, he sees
“the rapt, sometimes tearstained faces of adults, the elated scant-toothed grins of toddlers,
and young people…gazing at Scotty Hausmann with the rhapsodic joy of a generation
finally descrying someone worthy of its veneration” (345).
Conclusion
Thus, Scotty’s momentous concert at the end of Goon Squad offers the sense of a new
beginning but one which, at the same time, takes us a step closer to an inevitable finality.
As with the end of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, music helps effect a rapprochement in a
fractured society and offers a summation of lived experience. But it does this with both
optimism and mournfulness – the certain knowledge that the rock era, spanning the
35
second half of the twentieth century, has now passed, and along with it the ideology that
underpinned it. Rock and roll has grown old, as have the illusions that had sustained it,
but it is not so old that it can’t manage a final threadbare encore, a swansong of sorts to
usher in an uncertain future.
36
Notes
1 In a survey of English language newspapers from around the world from the last three
years (using the Nexis UK database), the phrase “the new rock and roll” was found in
headlines in reference to (among other things): “theater”, “talking”, “religion”, “science”,
“keeping hens”, “ballroom”, “food”, “comedy”, “clean living”, “private banking”, and
“hedge funds”.
2 For a fairly comprehensive list of rock novels, see Schaub.
3 For an example of this kind of sensationalist rock novel, though by an author with
considerable insider knowledge of the music industry, see Tony Parson’s Platinum Logic
(1981).
37
Works Cited
Cohen, Phil. “Subcultural Conflict and Working Class Community.” The Subcultures
Reader. Ed. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton. London: Routledge, 1997. 90-9.
Print.
DeLillo, Don. Great Jones Street. London: Picador, 1972. Print.
Dettmar, Kevin J.H. Is Rock Dead? New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: British Film Institute, 1979. Print.
Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad. London: Corsair, 2010. Print.
Fabbri, Franco. “A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications.” Popular Music
Perspectives. Ed. David Horn and Philip Tagg. Göteborg and Exeter:
International Association for the Study of Popular Music, 1981. 52-81. Print.
Franzen, Jonathan. Freedom. London: Fourth Estate, 2010. Print.
Frith, Simon. “The Industrialization of Music.” The Popular Music Studies Reader. Ed.
Andy Bennett, Barry Shank and Jason Toynbee. London: Routledge, 2006. 231-8.
Print.
38
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: the Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge,
1979. Print.
Keightley, Keir. “Reconsidering Rock.” The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock.
Ed. Simon Frith, Will Straw, John Street. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001. 109-142. Print.
Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus. London: Vintage, 1947. Print.
Negus, Keith. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry.
London: Edward Arnold, 1992. Print.
Parsons, Tony. Platinum Logic. London: Pan, 1981. Print.
Rushdie, Salman. The Ground Beneath Her Feet. London: Vintage, 1999. Print.
Schaub, Michael. “Wrapped Up in Books: A Guide to Rock Novels.” Bookslut,
September 2005. Web.
Seth, Vikram. An Equal Music. London: Phoenix, 1999. Print.
Smyth, Gerry. Music in Contemporary British Fiction: Listening to the Novel.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.
40
Notes on Contributor
Gerard Moorey is a Lecturer in Media at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. He is
also Editorial Assistant of a film-music journal, The Soundtrack. His PhD thesis was
entitled Everyday Reveries: Recorded Music, Memory, and Emotion. His research often
uses literary descriptions of music as historical source-material.